We all fail in the life-lessons which our great Teacher sets for us. The hardest school-tasks are easily mastered in comparison with the lessons of patience, sweet temper, forgiveness, unselfishness, humility, purity, contentment. Even at best we can learn these lessons but slowly. And though but little seems to come from our yearnings and strugglings after Christ-likeness, yet God honours the yearning and the striving; and while we sit in the shadows of weariness, disheartened with our failures, he carries on the work within us, and with his own hands produces the divine beauty in our souls.